Thursday, December 9, 2010

Within You Without You

Well, tonight I am hacking and coughing. Oh yeah, and achy and sneezy. I am somewhere far off in a corner of my head. You know, ears plugged and ringing when you bend over. Dizzy in waves. Tomorrow is gonna be a long day. The trumpet's clarion call of me blowing my nose sounds oft and loud. Ok, more like a fog horn. I tend to blow my nose too hard. There's one guy at my regular job who teases me every time he happens to hear me blow. He'll look up surprised. He glances at his watch, shrugs his shoulders and makes to leave like it's break time. We laugh at this every time. I think we laugh only because he carries it out every time. Like a tradition. Something we will always share underneath everything else. It's a small way in which we are connected. For some reason I just find the idea of him doing that funny. I sit here alone giggling out loud to myself. Eh, maybe I'm feverish.

It's almost 1am Saturday morning now. It was definitely hell at work Friday. All I craved was to curl up and sleep. Perchance to dream of not feeling like crap.

Dualism. Dualism is a twofold division in several spiritual, religious, and philosophical doctrines. Dualism is also a philosophy of mind where the mind and body are considered irreducibly distinct. The soul can exist without a body. And for our zombie fans out there the body surely can exist without a soul. That brushes the topic so lightly. People from Zarathushtra to Aristotle to Plato to Descarte have wrestled with the concept.

It's simply staggering the forms dualism takes. It's all over the place. In religion, politics, physics, feminist theory. There's more, but I gotta get going here.

The title of the George Harrison song Within You Without You has always fascinated me. Life goes on within you on two levels. Both the workings of the mind and the body. Life goes on without you; what's outside of you and well, you know, with out you. Pottersville and all that.

For those who ever took the time to ponder who their favorite Beatle was; I'd have to say mine was George. He wasn't political and hard like John. He wasn't cutesie and fluff like Paul. Ringo was, well, Ringo. George was the quiet almost forgotten one it seems to me. He was the one always searching I think. He had a yearning for people to realize their own greater good for the betterment of the world. He certainly searched long and hard for his own peace of mind.

So while a lot of people I know mourn the loss of John Lennon and listen to his Marxist manifesto Imagine; ponder these lyrics of George's from Within You Without You,
"When you've seen beyond yourself-then you may find, peace of mind,
Is waiting there-
And the time will come when you see
we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you."

It's the seeing beyond yourself that is so hard most of the time. To shake off whatever is holding you down at any given moment and truly know that the person sitting at the next work cubicle or across town at the lunch counter; the guy waiting for a train in New York, the Mom comforting her baby in Cairo; we are all connected. We are all one. We have basically the same hopes and fears. We feel the same emotions. It's within you and without you. We are tied together as surely as anything can be on this blue globe.